I wanted to do a brief review of the Zero to Hero challenge that was put on by WordPress.
What is “Zero To Hero”?
So one of the many times I tried to restart this blog, I was looking for challenges and prompts to use, and one of those was the Daily Post by WordPress. It is still an amazing resource for blog prompts and challenges, and if you are new to the blogging sphere, they have blogging courses that you can take through email. They even have photography challenges, if you’re into that sort of thing (which, I was).
In 2014, they were running this “Zero To Hero: 30 Days to a Better Blog” challenge, which has been revamped, but I had the foresight to save a PDF of the entire challenge before they finished the revamp. The premise of the challenge was that you would start as a total newbie beginner, pretending that you just started your blog today, and start from scratch.
“Zero To Hero” Review
I found #zerotohero a great way to get the party started. It forced me, a couple of times, to look at the prompt in a way to make it fit in my blog. For example, day 19 was “Publish A Post In A New-to-you Format” and since the WordPress changed so much between 2014 and today, I had to work with all the new “Blocks” that they added, which led me to the fun “What I Drank” series that I did for 2020 and February 2021. (I didn’t do one for March, but I’ll do one for both March and April.)
I also like that a lot of the challenges were forcing me to play around with the way my blog looked. At the beginning, I had settled on a theme, and at the end, I changed it several times to make it work. I think I’ve finally found one that I’m satisfied with, but I’m still always trying to change things up with the menus and widgets.
I also liked that the blog posts were far enough away from each other for me to plan them; the way I did this challenge was I read through all 30 prompts and challenges beforehand, so I had an idea of what I was going to do. Somethings did change, but this way I could plan ahead a little bit. For example, I moved a couple days around so they would be inline with my blogging schedule.
There are some days that I have not finished yet. Day 26 is “Set Up A Few Drafts for Later”, which I do have, but I want to set up more before I cross it off. Day 27 is “Revisit a Task” which I didn’t have the motivation for in March. Day 29 is “Build an Editorial Calendar” which I did, actually, but I want to go over it in more detail once I get down to business. And lastly, Day 30 is “Set a Goal for the Next Thirty Days”. I didn’t get around to doing that one either. I do plan on finishing all these four over the next couple of weeks.
The only thing I didn’t like was the new revamp to the challenge and website that they made to it after 2014. The revamp is honestly really hard to look through because you have to click through and look for the next day, and they have posts for Blogging 101 (which they use for Zero to Hero) mixed in with posts for Blogging 201. It’s either on purpose for more clicks or just really bad design (both of which are understandable but also not a great move).
Whereas in my PDF, there was a list of all the prompts and a link to each one with details. If you’re kind of a stickler for going in order like I am, then I’m glad I saved the PDF because otherwise I would have driven myself crazy with looking for all the challenges.
All in all, I would recommend it, especially if you are a blogging beginner or are restarting your writing after a while. Some people are still doing it, so if you are looking at the #zerotohero tag on WordPress, you still find some new entries, which is great!
